


For You I Know I'd Even Try To Turn The Tide

by villaingotyourcat



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Fluff, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-01
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:20:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26228578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/villaingotyourcat/pseuds/villaingotyourcat
Summary: Villanelle and Eve love each other twelve different ways at twelve different times.
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 35
Kudos: 118
Collections: Killing Eve Week 2020





	For You I Know I'd Even Try To Turn The Tide

_if suburbia is kind to them_

On the first Monday in September, a young couple moves into the house next to Eve’s. 

Eve watches from her bedroom window as a blonde woman and her brunette wife lift boxes from their expensive car and carry them into their suburban home. Even with the window closed, she can hear them laughing. Eve is not the type to bake welcome pies and introduce herself to new neighbors, so she watches from afar with quiet curiosity. When Niko asks, she tells him she just likes their car.

They meet raking leaves in the yard. Eve gripes about the ache in her lower back and Villanelle tells her she’s old. They compete to see who can make the bigger pile of leaves. Villanelle wins, jumps in Eve’s pile to celebrate, and helps a grumbling Eve rake her pile again.

Eve and Niko invite Villanelle and Maria over for dinner, and it ends up being more fun than anyone anticipates. They do it again the next weekend and the next. They fall into an easy routine of shared meals, game nights, and bickering over who shovels more snow or prunes more branches. In the spring, Villanelle lets her grass get so high that Eve reports her to the homeowner’s association. When a representative arrives at Villanelle’s house, the grass is perfectly cropped.

When Maria goes away on business trips, Villanelle invites Eve over for a movie and wine and kisses her on the couch. Eve thinks of Niko for a moment before Villanelle pulls her shirt over her head and Eve forgets her own name. The bowl of popcorn spills across the floor as Villanelle kisses down her neck, unhooking buttons as she goes. Villanelle carries her to the guest room, Eve squirming all the way.

If Eve thinks seeing Villanelle naked will make their weekly dinners awkward, she’s quickly proven wrong. With Niko and Maria, everything is the same, aside from Villanelle’s bare foot creeping up her leg beneath the dinner table. Eve begins to mark her calendar with Maria’s business trips, spends more nights sleeping at Villanelle’s. Her life begins to revolve around Villanelle’s texts, Villanelle’s impulses.

“You are so beautiful, Eve,” Villanelle whispers into her skin.

Eve yields to Villanelle’s hands, tries to let it be enough.

_if the blood doesn’t stop flowing_

Villanelle disappears.

Eve searches hospital records and obituaries and funeral homes, but Villanelle has vanished. She spends her days googling murders and crying in the bathroom, spends her nights dreaming of Villanelle’s hot blood spilled all over her hands. Every morning, she wakes with a jolt. She is always a second too late to save Villanelle. 

Kenny finds out first. When Eve hears, she throws up in an M16 bathroom. There will be no funeral for a woman who legally died five years ago. She doesn't know what was done with the body. She spends the first week nauseous in bed, the second crying constantly, the third staring blankly at her ceiling.

She leaves Niko and quits her job. She moves to Paris and buys Villanelle’s old apartment, gets a job as a barista at a cafe that is always flooded with tourists. Her coworkers and customers whisper about the emptiness behind her eyes, the rasp in her voice.

When Eve stops showing up for work, assumptions are made and her position is filled a week later.

_if there was never a plan b_

When Eve is eleven, her family takes a trip to Moscow.

Her father has important business meetings with government officials, leaving Eve and her mother free to roam the city streets. Here, she meets a girl two years younger than her with shiny brown hair and bright eyes. Despite her Russian upbringing, Oksana speaks English almost fluently, though she tells Eve she is still learning. They exchange addresses and promise to write.

Eve spends the next eight years of her life writing letters to Oksana. She writes about her small Connecticut town, skating in the winter and swimming in the summer and her first kiss with Niko Polastri behind the mall in his father’s car. Oksana writes about her small Russian town, about sledding in the winter and tanning in the summer and her first time putting her fingers inside of a girl in a supply closet. Eve writes to her in Russian and Oksana responds in English, their original letters tucked into the envelopes with tiny corrections made in pen.

When Eve is nineteen, she enrolls in Lomonosov Moscow State University as a criminal psychology major. Oksana joins her a year later as a linguistics major. They spend their days making up for lost time, taking pictures together at landmarks in the city and kissing in cafes while they study together. 

After graduation, they move to Italy and marry by the sea. In their haste to remove each other’s dresses, they track sand up every step of the staircase in their expensive hotel. 

“I loved you forever,” Eve tells her.

“I’ve loved you longer.”

_if villanelle has better aim_

Once Villanelle’s anger dissipates, she is left with an unfamiliar feeling.

It churns in her stomach like spoiled milk, gnaws at her insides like the beginning of the end. When she returns to the Roman ruins, Eve’s body is gone. There are no sirens, no paramedics, no blood. A man asks if she will take his picture. She smashes his camera beneath the heel of her boot and leaves him there, wordless and confused. 

Eve’s funeral is an intimate affair at a small Korean church in Connecticut. Villanelle changes her mind a dozen times before entering the church after the service has already begun. She sits in the last pew, staring at the characters of the Korean Bible as people she does not know lie about Eve. They tell the congregation that she was kind and loving and selfless to the end. Villanelle wants to laugh. She cries instead. 

She is the first one to leave, her face concealed beneath a veil and high collar. Still, a man she vaguely recognizes catches her eyes. He is one of Eve’s friends, the big boss’s son. He nods at her once before turning away.

If anyone is watching Villanelle’s kills anymore, they would easily notice her change in style. Her kills are angry and frightening, the kind of things that parents shield their children’s eyes from. She stabs a man thirteen times in the chest before cutting off all of his fingers and stuffing them in his mouth. She shoots a woman in the face until she can see through her skull, leaves her in her bathtub with the water running. She kills targets, witnesses, everyone on the upper floor of the hotel.

They catch her and lock her in a cell where the sun does not shine and leave her body to rot; the rest of her has already been dead a long time.

_if eve doesn’t want for more_

Eve meets Carolyn at the Purple Penguin. 

She does not like Carolyn. She does not like the way she sits with her eyes closed for long moments, as though she has simply disappeared and left her body behind. She does not like the fact that Carolyn does not order any food. She does not like Carolyn’s presumption or her forwardness or her small brown shoes. When Carolyn offers her the job, she has only one question.

“Will my husband and I be safe?

Carolyn looks at her for a long moment, draws all her breath in.

“No, I’m afraid not.”

Eve gets a job as a receptionist at the school Niko works at. She holds Niko’s hand on the bus ride to and from school, eats lunch with him in his classroom. She spends her evenings going out with Bill and Elena. They laugh about Carolyn’s job offer, talk about the boy that has filled Eve’s old job. Elena thinks he’s cute. 

One morning, Eve is getting ready to turn off the television when something catches her eye. A young woman called Oksana Astankova has been arrested. She is allegedly an international assassin responsible for the murder of at least twenty-five people. Something in the woman’s face gives her pause. She stands there for a while, watching the police usher her into a van.

“Honey, are you watching television? We’ve got thirty minutes to get to Kenny and Elena’s wedding!”

Eve turns the television off.

_if eve’s passcode isn’t 1234_

Eve thinks she’s being catfished. 

A week ago, Elena helped her set up a Tinder profile, waggling her eyebrows as she selected men and women in her preferences. She spends a few days ogling pretty women and pointedly ignoring the pickup lines that men send to her before matching with the most gorgeous woman she has ever seen. They’ve been texting for a few days, exchanging flirty banter and generous compliments. Eve checks her phone a hundred times a day, blushes all the time. 

“She can’t be real,” Eve asks Elena, “Right?”

Villanelle is very real. They meet at a fancy restaurant in the heart of the city, and Eve spends the first ten minutes staring at the massive chandeliers that hang above her. When Villanelle arrives, Eve spends the whole meal staring at her crisp button-down and suit jacket, her high cheekbones and full lips. 

The conversation is fun and easy. Villanelle is funny and rude and eats like a caged animal, and they spend the evening drinking expensive wine and laughing too loudly. At the end of the night, Villanelle takes her home. 

Elena doesn’t let Eve hear the end of it for weeks. 

_if they never have a chance_

Eve is sleep deprived and delirious when she finds her.

She’s been up for forty hour straight, researching and writing to finish her thesis in time. The fluorescent light of the library is starting to give her a headache, or it could be the lack of sleep, the overconsumption of caffeine, the lack of nutritious food, anything really. The words on the page are all starting to slide together and the world around her is muffled, as though she’s underwater, but Eve will finish this thesis if it kills her. 

It is with tired eyes that Eve first sees her. She was a young woman who began killing in 1919 and spent the better part of the next decade assassinating over forty highly influential people around the globe. She worked for a private organization that wanted to further the borders of the young Soviet Union. She played an instrumental part in bringing about Russia’s role as a communist country, and yet much of history has overlooked her.

However, she is more than a political instrument. Oksana Astankova was born in 1894 to Anatoly and Tatianna Astankova. Though never properly diagnosed, there are whisperings of her psychopathy that date back to the time she spent in orphanages. At eighteen, she was imprisoned for the murder and castration of a man called Maximilian Leonova. She was recruited at age twenty from prison at which point she presumably underwent some form of training before beginning to kill for a living.

The more Eve reads, the more she likes Oksana, who went by the codename Villanelle. Her kills have a unique, stylistic flair to them, as though she was showing off for someone. In her tired brain, Eve almost feels like Villanelle was showing off for her. She crushed gender stereotypes by becoming one of the first widely known female assassins. Her clothes are beautiful, high-end pieces that are far ahead of their time, many of them trends that will not become more popular until the 1990s. 

Eve uses her university’s printer ink to print out several pages worth of colored pictures featuring Villanelle and her kills. She has a lost look in her eye, Eve notes. It is both direct and also chilling. With a fresh coffee in hand, she begins to rework the lackluster aspects of her thesis. 

Among her facts and figures, Villanelle fits perfectly. 

_if bill lives_

It takes Eve a moment to notice her.

Eve spends a minute rifling through her purse for a tissue before she feels the young woman’s eyes on her. She glances subtly to her left, as she blows her nose, opening her eyes with her head bent downward. Through her lashes, she sees Villanelle’s unmistakable form. A moment later, she is on the move. Eve follows her down the crowded streets of Berlin, leaving Bill voicemail messages as she goes. 

“Bill, I’ve found her. Call me,” she hisses into the phone. 

Villanelle has long legs and moves with a sense of urgency that has Eve practically running to keep up. She weaves her way through a crowd, crosses a street, loses sight of Villanelle behind a city bus. It takes her a second to discover that Villanelle has turned down an alley, and she follows her into the dark, heart pounding in her chest.

When they emerge, they’re a block from a noisy night club. Villanelle slips past the bodyguard easily, but Eve has no such luck. In broken German, Eve tries to explain the situation, shoves her badge in their faces until one of them relents. 

The club is completely dark inside aside from a strobe light that flashes with enough intensity to give people seizures. The beat of the music is hard and heavy, and the crowd around her pulses with it. She lets her eyes adjust to the darkness as she scans for the pattern of Villanelle’s suit. It is only then that she spots her, a single figure that does not match the rhythm of the crowd.

She pursues Villanelle with purpose, pressing her way through the thick mass of bodies with little regard for anyone but the assassin just beyond her reach. They’re nearing the edge of the crowd, and she’s almost close enough to reach her when Villanelle turns.

Villanelle’s face catches in the light, and she smiles at Eve with all her teeth. Then, Villanelle is moving toward her and Eve is moving backward, pushing with all her might. She is going to be murdered on the dance floor. 

It only takes Villanelle a moment to catch her, and Eve’s scream is swallowed by the crowd. She squeezes her eyes shut and shakes and shakes and shakes as the tears pour from her eyes. She tries to beg, but her throat is scaped raw from the scream. Villanelle’s hand is wrapped around her wrist, and she suddenly realizes that Villanelle is not killing her. She is waiting.

When Eve looks up, she is embarrassed to find Villanelle laughing, the sound lost but the creases of her eyes giving her away. She leans closer to Eve and begins to move in time with the music. She lowers her head so that it is only inches away from her ear.

“Dance with me, Eve.”

_if it’s all in vain_

They make it three months.

When things are good between them, everything is perfect. They share baths and watch movies and do nothing but kiss for hours in silk sheets with the sun warm on their skin. When things are bad between them, they are unrecognizable. They shout and throw things and make threats that sting like hands on flesh. 

They fight about the same things all the time. Eve wants more than life on the run. She wants a place to settle, clothes she can unpack from her suitcase, the absence of the constant fear that is a weight on her chest. Some days, Villanelle is not enough for her.

They fight about even more about the same things. Villanelle cannot forgive herself. She kisses the scar on Eve’s back when Eve is awake and cries over it when she sleeps. She dreams of the people she has killed, the things they have told her, the lives she has stolen from them. Some days, Eve is not enough for her.

At her worst, Eve loathes Villanelle. She cannot look at her, cannot touch her, cannot even sense her presence in a room. If she does, she will lunge at Villanelle, claw at her like she did on the bus. Villanelle always holds her until the rage subsides. 

At her worst, Villanelle loathes herself. She cries more tears than she has in her entire lifetime, does not know how to atone for what she has done. She does not want Eve to see her like this. If she does, Villanelle begs Eve to leave her. Eve always holds her until the despair subsides.

One morning, Eve wakes alone to a ring and a note that says only, “Sorry Baby X.”

_if late is better than never_

They meet in the Kensington Care Home. 

With Niko gone, Eve moved into the assisted living facility a year ago. She has a little trouble walking and can’t easily climb stairs, and she has heart troubles that will linger forever. Villanelle lives in the room next door. She is five years younger than Eve, but her memory is beginning to fail. The spark between them is instantaneous. 

Eve likes Villanelle more than she can ever remember liking anyone. Villanelle is smart and funny in a way that surprises her, and they spend all of their time together. In the mornings, they take walks around the courtyard and read aloud to one another. Villanelle reads her poetry in French, kisses her hands in the early morning light. In the afternoons, they play chess and watch the people pass by on the street, making up stories for each person as they go. Occasionally, Villanelle will make up a story that sounds just a little too specific to be random, but Eve does not push. In the evenings, they sit together on the porch swing and share the cafeteria’s lousy attempts at cobblers and strudels. At night, they watch movies together in Villanelle’s room and kiss on top of her faded pink comforter.

When there is nothing left to do, Villanelle and Eve prank the other residents. They steal Helen’s hearing aids while she’s napping in the common area and stifle smiles when she shouts at a volume that she cannot register. They put a small cockroach in Mildred’s tomato soup and watch her spill the whole bowl on her white blouse. Once, they steal the disc intended for movie night and replace it with porn. They nearly get in trouble for that one when Albert almost has a heart attack.

Sometimes, Eve will wonder what life would have been like if she had met Villanelle forty years sooner. She does not imagine Villanelle would be the type to marry and raise children, but she thinks she could’ve coerced her into a small wedding. She thinks Rome would be a lovely place to have a wedding. 

Mostly, Eve enjoys the time she has with Villanelle; it’s been a long time since she’s been this happy.

_if it’s all wrong_

This will be Villanelle’s last kill.

After the bridge, Villanelle accepts Carolyn’s job offer. She will do one last job, and then she and Eve will be free of MI6 and The Twelve and all of the other people that have spent the five years using them like pawns in a game they are not privy to. Villanelle promises Eve that she will be safe, kisses both her cheeks before she goes.

It is the last time Eve sees Villanelle alive.

It was quick, they tell her. She did not suffer, they tell her. She died a hero, they tell her. Eve wants to scream and shout and cry and tell them that she could give a shit about Villanelle dying a hero when she’s the one who has to go on living here without her. 

She spends her days caving inward like a collapsing star. Every country is one that Villanelle has been to and every joke is one that she wanted to slap Villanelle for and every movie is one that Villanelle wanted to watch with her. She sees her on street corners, in magazines, at the grocery stores. She orders all her food in and burns all her magazines and stops going outside. 

She spends her time curled up in bed, dry-eyed and empty. She drinks in the mornings and does not recognize herself in the afternoons. She takes pills to sleep in the evenings and lies awake at night anyway. Her chest has begun to rot, and the damage goes in so far that she’s afraid if she scrapes it out, there will be nothing left.

How cruel of the universe to take Villanelle from her when they were so close to having everything.

_if love is enough_

Villanelle and Eve kiss in a bed.

They could be in London or Berlin or Paris or Rome or Alaska. They could be teenagers, tasting the want of another person for the first time. They could be adults, kissing with the skill that comes from experience, practice. They could be old women, so familiar with one another’s faces that not even blindness will hinder them. 

Outside their window, there is a city full of people. Some are happy and some are not, some are alone and some are not, some are loved and some are not. Tomorrow, those that are happy will not be and those that are not alone will be and those that are loved will not be. The tide changes and the universe draws soulmates toward one another and away again. Sometimes their hands meet and sometimes they do not; sometimes they just brush against one another, and this is when it is the most painful. There are only the moments that the universe gives them and the ones it does not.

For now, it is enough for Villanelle and Eve to simply coexist.

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on Tumblr! [@villaingotyourcat](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/villaingotyourcat)


End file.
